1. Technical Field
Various embodiments of the disclosed technology relate to reputation management and, more particularly, to systems and methods for reputation management in an online environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The primary goals of a reputation management scheme are determining the service quality of the peers who provide a service (i.e., service providers) by using feedback from the peers who have rated the service (i.e., raters); and determining the trustworthiness of the raters by analyzing the feedback they provide about the service providers. Thus, the success of a reputation management scheme depends on the robustness of the mechanism to accurately evaluate the reputations of the service providers and the trustworthiness of the raters.
As in every security system, trust and reputation management systems are subject to malicious behaviors. Malicious raters may attack particular service providers (e.g., sellers) to undermine their reputations while helping other service providers by boosting their reputations. Malicious service providers may also provide good service qualities (or sell high-quality products) to certain customers in order to keep their reputations high while cheating other customers unlikely to provide feedback. Moreover, malicious raters or service providers may collaboratively mount sophisticated attack strategies by exploiting their prior knowledge about the reputation mechanism. Hence, building a resilient trust and reputation management system that is robust against malicious activities is a challenging issue.
Various systems exist for enabling reputation management between service providers and users, but the current systems lack several benefits of embodiments of the present disclosed technology. Conventional reputation management schemes include global reputation management schemes where the reputation of a service provider is based on ratings from general users. Many of the prior global reputation management schemes used by many well known web sites such as eBay®, Amazon® Epinions®, and AllExperts™ mostly compute the average (or weighted average) of the ratings received for a peer (or product) to evaluate the global reputation of the peer. Hence, these schemes are vulnerable to collaborative attacks by malicious peers.
Moreover, a reputation management scheme should be efficient. A scheme high in computational complexity runs the risk of becoming out-of-date for failing to keep up with incoming ratings data. For example, in Histos the central node/server keeps all the ratings between the peers and generates a graph to calculate the ratings of each peer for the other peers. (G. Zacharia, A. Moukas, and P. Maes, “Collaborative Reputation Mechanisms in Electronic Marketplaces,” in Proc. 32nd Ann. Hawaii Int'l Conf. System Sciences (HICSS '99), 1999). However, each update of this graph requires many computations. Hence, this scheme is burdened by high-computational complexity.